Examined too casually, the stories of Plymouth Colony and Hanukkah seem to show heroes fighting for universal religious freedom. But the heroes of the Jewish story fought not only against a foreign persecutor. They also fought against fellow Jews who—perhaps more attracted to the cosmopolitan and sophisticated Greek culture than to the ways of their ancestors—cooperated with their rulers.

Jews know the fuller history of the holiday because Christians preserved the books that the Jews themselves lost. In a further twist, Jews in the Middle Ages encountered the story of the martyred mother and her seven sons anew in Christian literature and once again placed it in the time of the Maccabees. Jon D. Levenson

In a case brought by an Israeli woman earlier this year, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that involuntary separation between the sexes on public buses was against the law. CNN

We must not allow margins groups to break our common denominator and we must keep our public spaces open and safe for all of our citizens. We must find the uniting and mediating ground rather than the things that divide and separate us. Netanyahu

Egged does not deal with seating arrangements on its buses and even if there are population groups that prefer to sit separately due to their beliefs, it is a voluntary choice and does not bind the other passengers. Spokesman for the Egged bus company)

There are a lot of lovely things about religion, but forcing people to choose religion is wrong. (…) It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity. Tanya Rosenblit

What Yediot Acharonot doesn’t tell is that Ms. Rosenblit took one of the haredi Mehadrin buses and NOT an ordinary EGGED bus.The readership not being familiar with the different bus lines from Ashdod to Jerusalem will get the impression that the incident happened on a regular EGGED bus but this is not the case. Tanya Rosenblit apparently used one of the Mehadrin buses on purpose in order to provoke the haredi passengers and get her headlines.Shearim

We have no authority to impose our opinion on others. This is a public place. (…) If we want separation, setting up a special bus company for certain lines is legitimate, and then we’ll be the landlords.Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger

A person can be strict about himself, but not about others. If the haredim want to be strict in their own buses, let them. But imposing it on other people is irrelevant.Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar

We have two states here. A First World state that is considered a pioneer, alongside a state whose citizens do not get the tools and conditions to contend with the modern-day economy. The second state’s part in the overall population keeps growing, and just like a weight it keeps pulling everything downward. We can maintain this inequality as long as the less-employed population groups are relatively small. The question is how big they’re getting.Professor Dan Ben-David (economist, Taub Center for Social Policy)

The problem is that a large slice of the population doesn’t contribute to the infrastructure of our society. And even if they do participate in the economy in any way, it isn’t in the professions or positions that demand academic education and intelligence: academia, doctors, pilots, engineers and army and law enforcement officers. We need them more than we need lawyers, which is the usual academic route they choose to follow. The problem is a serious one, which could potentially bring down the State of Israel, yet with minor policy changes this situation can be averted. Professor Menachem Megidor (mathematician and former president of the Hebrew University)

Megidor claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s measures to reduce government child support stipends during his term as finance minister pressured the haredi world to go out and join the workforce and secular academic institutions.Ynetnews

Historically, the haredi community has survived only as a minority. There was never a situation whereby the ultra-Orthodox were a majority outside the ghetto. They need a secular majority to be ultra-Orthodox; they need very clear borders with the outside world, because when these borders do not exist, things such as assimilation occur. You can remain detached from modernism only when you are part of the minority. They (haredim) are prepared to become the majority (when the messiah comes), but we’re not there yet, and they are scared to death of the possibility that their community will be connected to Israel’s public affairs.Dr. Daniel Hartman (head of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem)

A celebration of religious freedom, the holiday fits well with the American political tradition.

Jon D. Levenson

The WSJ

December 16, 2011

The eight-day festival of Hanukkah, which Jews world-wide will begin celebrating Tuesday night, is one of the better known of the Jewish holidays but also one of the less important.

The emphasis placed on it now is mostly due to timing: Hanukkah offers Jews an opportunity for celebration and commercialization comparable to what their Christian neighbors experience at Christmas, and it gives Christians the opportunity to include Jews in their holiday greetings and parties. What’s more, the observances associated with Hanukkah are few, relatively undemanding, and even appealing to children.

The story of Hanukkah also fits the political culture of the United States. Its underlying narrative recalls that of the Pilgrims: A persecuted religious minority, at great cost, breaks free of their oppressors. It wasn’t separatist Protestants seeking freedom from the Church of England in 1620, but Jews in the land of Israel triumphing over their Hellenistic overlord in 167–164 B.C., reclaiming and purifying their holiest site, the Jerusalem Temple.

Examined too casually, the stories of Plymouth Colony and Hanukkah seem to show heroes fighting for universal religious freedom. But the heroes of the Jewish story fought not only against a foreign persecutor. They also fought against fellow Jews who—perhaps more attracted to the cosmopolitan and sophisticated Greek culture than to the ways of their ancestors—cooperated with their rulers.

The revolt begins, in fact, when the patriarch of the Maccabees (as the family that led the campaign came to be known) kills a fellow Jew who was in the act of obeying the king’s decree to perform a sacrifice forbidden in the Torah. The Maccabean hero also kills the king’s officer and tears down the illicit altar. These were blows struck for Jewish traditionalism, and arguably for Jewish survival and authenticity, but not for religious freedom.

Over time, the stories of the persecutions that led to this war came to serve as models of Jewish faithfulness under excruciating persecution. In the most memorable instance, seven brothers and their mother all choose, successively, to die at the hands of their torturers rather than to yield to the demand to eat pork as a public disavowal of the God of Israel and his commandments.

To the martyrs, breaking faith with God is worse than death. In one version, their deaths are interpreted as « an atoning sacrifice » through which God sustained the Jewish people in their travail.

The tone here isn’t the lightheartedness of the Christmas season. The Christian parallels lie, instead, with Good Friday and the story of Jesus’s acceptance of his suffering and sacrificial death. In both the Jewish and the Christian stories, the death of the heroes, grievous though it is, is not the end: It is the prelude to a miraculous vindication and a glorious restoration.

The Roman Catholic tradition honors these Jewish martyrs as saints, and the Eastern Orthodox Church still celebrates Aug. 1 as the Feast of the Holy Maccabees. By contrast, in the literature of the Rabbis of the first several centuries of the common era, the story lost its connection to the Maccabean uprising, instead becoming associated with later persecutions by the Romans, which the Rabbis experienced. If the change seems odd, recall that the compositions that first told of these events (the books of Maccabees) were not part of the scriptural canon of rabbinic Judaism. But they were canonical in the Church (and remain so in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communions).

And so we encounter another oddity of Hanukkah: Jews know the fuller history of the holiday because Christians preserved the books that the Jews themselves lost. In a further twist, Jews in the Middle Ages encountered the story of the martyred mother and her seven sons anew in Christian literature and once again placed it in the time of the Maccabees.

« Hanukkah » means « dedication. » Originally, the term referred to the rededication of the purified Temple after the Maccabees’ stunning military victory. But as the story of the martyrs shows, the victory was also associated with the heroic dedication of the Jewish traditionalists of the time to their God and his Torah. If Hanukkah celebrates freedom, it is a freedom to be bound to something higher than freedom itself.

Mr. Levenson, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard Divinity School, is co-author with Kevin J. Madigan of

« Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews » (Yale University Press, 2008).

Jerusalem (CNN) — When Tanya Rosenblit boarded an inter-city bus bound for Jerusalem from her native Ashdod Friday morning, she did not anticipate the storm it would spark within Israel.

The public bus she boarded normally carries ultra-Orthodox passengers and travels to an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem.

As a matter of custom women sit in the back portion of the bus, because the ultra-Orthodox avoid mingling of the sexes according to their beliefs. She was the first passenger that morning on the bus and took a seat behind the driver. As the bus took on more passengers along its route, an ultra-orthodox man demanded she should sit in the back of the bus as is the custom on that route.

« I heard him call me ‘Shikse,' » Rosenblit wrote on her Facebook page, referencing a Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. « He demanded I sit in the back of the bus, because Jewish men couldn’t sit behind women (!!!). I refused. »

« This is my home town of Ashdod, I live in an Israeli democracy, people cannot tell me where to sit on a bus. »

An argument ensued and ultimately the bus driver called the police to intervene, but not before a crowd of black-clad ultra-orthodox men had gathered outside the bus.

« I was starting to get scared, to tell you the truth, » Rosenblit recalled. « There were like 20 of them, all wearing black. Most of them were just curious, but they were definitely on his side. »

Rosenblit snapped throughout this disruption, and said she was comfortable knowing that Israeli law was on her side.

In a case brought by an Israeli woman earlier this year, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that involuntary separation between the sexes on public buses was against the law.

The responding police officer tried to talk to everyone and calm things down. Rosenblit said he asked if she was willing to show respect for the objectors and move to the back of the bus. She refused and, after a 30-minute delay, the bus moved on to Jerusalem with her sitting up front.

A day after posting the account on Facebook, Rosenblit’s story was picked up by the Israeli media, which has been devoting a lot of coverage to the public outcry over the growing political power of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, and fears they are forcing the generally secular Israeli public to adopt their religious standards.

Israel’s largest circulation newspaper put her story on its front page with the headline, « They Won’t Tell Me Where to Sit, » and compared Rosenblit to the American civil rights movement’s legendary Rosa Parks.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up her story in his weekly cabinet meeting.

« Up until this day we have agreed to live in peace with mutual respect by all sectors of the Israeli society, » he told his government ministers.

« In recent days we witness attempts to break this coexistence apart. Today, for example, I have heard of an attempt to move a woman from her seat on a bus. I oppose this unequivocally. I believe we must not allow margins groups to break our common denominator and we must keep our public spaces open and safe for all of our citizens. We must find the uniting and mediating ground rather than the things that divide and separate us. » Netanyahu said.

Rosenblit also received a call from Israel’s opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, who offered her support and called her a symbol of determination against « anti-democratic radicalization that pushes women away from the public space. »

A spokesman for Egged, the transportation company that runs the bus line, told CNN in a statement that it « does not deal with seating arrangements » on its buses and that « even if there are population groups that prefer to sit separately due to their beliefs, it is a voluntary choice and does not bind the other passengers. »

Rosenblit describes herself as secular and said she did not ride the bus looking for a confrontation. She said what motivated her to write about her experience was not « not to declare the Orthodox Jews as pure evil and the oppressors of human rights and liberties, » but to point out what she sees as societal problem in Israel.

« There are a lot of lovely things about religion, but forcing people to choose religion is wrong, » she said.

« It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity. »

I lived in Israel all my life. I was brought up in a free country and I was taught the value of freedom as a basic right that could never be undermined by anyone. All my life, during my teens, my military service, my university years and then after I always felt as equal among my peers. I was always proud to be a woman and never felt deprived or weakened by men, until today.I had an appointment in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem and looked for easy transportation on a Friday morning. After checking the official Egged site, which is the leading bus company in Israel, I decided to take line 451 from Ashdod (my hometown) to Jerusalem. I chose this line because it stopped a mere five minute walk from my scheduled appointment.

The driver looked at the station where I was standing and didn’t stop. I had to signal him by raising my hand for him to stop. When I entered the bus he looked surprised. He explained that the only ones who go on the bus are Orthodox Jews. I sat behind him in the first row and asked for him to tell me when we get to my station.

At the next stop, Orthodox Jews started mounting the bus. At first, they just stared at me, but said nothing and moved on to sit somewhere in the bus behind us. Only one passenger decided that he preferred standing on the stairs near the driver, although there was plenty of space. I didn’t mind that, and focused on the music in my ears. But then, another one entered the bus, but instead of entering, he prevented the driver from closing the door. He looked at me with despise, and when I took off the earphones, I heard him call me “Shikse”, which means “whore” in Yiddish. He demanded I sit in the back of the bus, because Jewish men couldn’t sit behind women (!!!). I refused.

The driver tried to talk to him, explained that he was late, but the “penguin” wouldn’t budge. Another passenger, also religious and orthodox asked the driver to be refunded because he was gonna miss his meeting. He also said that he didn’t mind what was going on, he just wanted to get to where he was going and that the fact that they decided to stop the bus is a good reason for the driver to give him his money back. For company policy, he didn’t, but that’s a different story.

The driver understood he was not going to move anytime soon, so he called the police. Until that moment, no one tried to talk to me. The only comment I heard was from the initiator of this whole mess ordering me to sit in the back of the bus as a sign of respect. In the meantime, a crowd started forming outside the bus, as a result of his cries. I was starting to get scared, to tell you the truth. There were like 20 of them, all wearing black. Most of them were just curious, but they were definitely on his side.

After a while, the police came. It was one officer who first talked to the driver. The driver explained to him that he didn’t tell me anything and that they wouldn’t budge. Then, the officer had a long conversation with the person who started this whole mess. It seemed quite friendly, and in the end, the policeman came to me and asked me if I was willing to respect them and sit in the back of the bus. I answered that I respected them enough by wearing modest cloths, because I knew I was going to an Orthodox neighborhood, but I wouldn’t be humiliated by those who can’t even respect their own mothers and wives.

The officer stepped down and so did the leader of the little protest that was going on. He stayed in Ashdod, while the rest of the Orthodox Jews, including those who got on the bus later on boarded the bus and quietly went to sit behind me. The person who chose to stand on the stairs at the beginning remained on the stairs sitting and praying throughout the entire bus ride, because he wouldn’t sit behind a woman!!!

The entire delay took about half an hour, but we managed to arrive on time. In the neighborhood, I met some very pleasant people who were very happy and eager to help me when I asked for directions, men and women, Orthodox and religious. When I later decided to take a walk around the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem, I was again treated as an equal, as a secular woman, with the utmost respect and sympathy, by men and women of all streams.

The reason I am posting this story is not to declare the Orthodox Jews as pure evil and the oppressors of human rights and liberties. I want to point out that this is a social and educational problem. There are a lot of lovely things about religion, but forcing people to choose religion is wrong. It is wrong to use religion as an excuse to eliminate people’s basic rights: the right for freedom and the right for dignity.

The Israeli newspaper YEDIOT ACHARONOT greeted its readers with a huge headline this morning. The 28 – year – old student Tanya Rosenblit became the latest « hero » of those women being attacked by Haredim on certain Egged buses. HERE is the article from Yediot where Tanya Rosenblit describes her bus ride from Ashdod to Jerusalem. She placed herself in the men’s section of the bus and got attacked by the male haredi bus passengers.

However, what Yediot Acharonot doesn’t tell is that Ms. Rosenblit took one of the haredi Mehadrin buses and NOT an ordinary EGGED bus.

The readership not being familiar with the different bus lines from Ashdod to Jerusalem will get the impression that the incident happened on a regular EGGED bus but this is not the case. Tanya Rosenblit apparently used one of the Mehadrin buses on purpose in order to provoke the haredi passengers and get her headlines.

Mehadrin buses have separate seating (men in the front and women in the back) and as soon as I use such a bus, I know what to expect. I am fully aware of the separate seating but Tanya Rosenblit ignored the fact and now received her headlines.YEDIOT ACHARONOT, on the other hand, is very well – known for its anti – haredi policy and articles.

Israel’s haredi press has been reporting the whole day about the incident and came to the conclusion that Tanya Rosenblit is nothing but provoking.